A huge, already damaged radio telescope in Puerto Rico that has played a key role in astronomical discoveries for more than half a century completely collapsed on Tuesday.
The telescope’s 900-ton receiver platform and the Gregorian dome — a structure as tall as a four-story building that houses secondary reflectors — fell onto the northern portion of the vast reflector dish more than 400 feet below.
The project We Rate COVID Dashboards has been evaluating college and university attempts at transparency. Eight months into the pandemic, how are institutions doing?
The next round of SAT and ACT testing is just days away, and students are preparing differently this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Perhaps the biggest change is how they’re meeting.
Tutor Alexis Clark said while she used to be meet in coffee shops to review, now she’s working with students online through Google Meet.
Clark noted while many universities are moving away from requiring standardized tests for admission, a big benefit of testing is the scholarship opportunities.
“Especially now that people are going to be choosing colleges probably closer to home, so yeah, it really helps with affordability,” Clark said.
eLife Editorial; Michael B Eisen , Anna Akhmanova, Timothy E Behrens, Diane M Harper, Detlef Weigel, Mone Zaidi
from
The growing popularity of preprints has enabled researchers to make their papers freely and immediately available to anyone with an internet connection. Many eLife authors were early adopters of preprinting, and support within our community continues to expand: a recent internal analysis showed that nearly 70% of papers under review at eLife were already available on bioRxiv, medRxiv or arXiv.
This is a major milestone. It means that for all practical purposes eLife is no longer a publisher: rather, eLife is now an organization that reviews and certifies papers that have already been published. We welcome this moment, and the long-awaited opportunity it provides to replace the traditional “review, then publish” model developed in the age of the printing press with a “publish, then review” model optimized for the age of the internet.
Oregon State University researchers have received a $2 million grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to create a national TRACE Center that will expand the OSU’s COVID-19 public health project to other states.
The center will harness the power of public health departments, universities and other institutions around the country to help measure the prevalence of the virus that causes COVID-19 by combining community surveillance sampling, wastewater analysis, viral sequence data and mathematical models of SARS-CoV-2 prevalence that OSU TRACE researchers have developed.
AquaVitas, LLC, a wastewater analytics company spun out from Arizona State University and focused on wastewater-based epidemiology for contaminants, narcotics and contagious elements, such as SARS-CoV-2, today announced an agreement with the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for a nationwide study of wastewater for SARS-CoV-2 viral elements.
Under the terms of the agreement, HHS will fund the procurement and testing for SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater samples from treatment plants of large and small communities across the U.S. Under Phase 1 of the contract, wastewater from up to 100 treatment plants that serve 10% of the US population will be tested. Phase 1 will last six week
The instrument platform of the 305-meter telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico fell at approximately 7:55 a.m. Atlantic Standard Time Dec. 1, resulting in damage to the dish and surrounding facilities.
No injuries were reported as a result of the collapse. The U.S. National Science Foundation ordered the area around the telescope to be cleared of unauthorized personnel since the failure of a cable Nov. 6. Local authorities will keep the area cordoned off as engineers work to assess the stability of the observatory’s other structures.
Horizon: the EU Research & Innovation magazine, Tom Cassauwers
from
‘We are now able to produce AI models that are very efficient in making decisions,’ said Fosca Giannotti, senior researcher at the Information Science and Technology Institute of the National Research Council in Pisa, Italy. ‘But often these models are impossible to understand for the end-user, which is why explainable AI is becoming so popular.’
Diagnosis
Giannotti leads a research project on explainable AI, called XAI, which wants to make AI systems reveal their internal logic. The project works on automated decision support systems like technology that helps a doctor make a diagnosis or algorithms that recommend to banks whether or not to give someone a loan. They hope to develop the technical methods or even new algorithms that can help make AI explainable.
‘Humans still make the final decisions in these systems,’ said Giannotti. ‘But every human that uses these systems should have a clear understanding of the logic behind the suggestion. ’
Huge holes in state budgets due to the coronavirus pandemic and the demonstrated eagerness of fans to bet on sports are likely to spur a further expansion of sports betting and online casino gambling, experts said Tuesday.
Speaking at the Betting On Sports America online conference, gambling executives, analysts and lawmakers agreed that the lure of new tax revenue could prove irresistible to cash-strapped state governments facing large deficits due to the pandemic.
And the results of last month’s elections, in which voters in numerous states approved allowing or expanding casinos or sports betting, show that demand exists for legalized gambling in additional states. According to the American Gaming Association, the casino industry’s national trade group, 44 states plus Washington, D.C., have legalized some form of casino gaming, including sports betting.
Nobody hopes for such misfortune. But for social scientists, the disasters that have struck Lake Charles and other communities this year have provided a rare opportunity to study how people weigh and respond to different kinds of risks. In Lake Charles, for example, people twice had to weigh the perils of trying to ride out an oncoming hurricane against the risk of contracting COVID-19 if they evacuated to a packed emergency shelter. In California and other states, residents faced similar choices when confronted with several waves of massive wildfires.
The researchers say their surveys and interviews have revealed that such stress can induce what they call “disaster fatigue”—a form of emotional exhaustion that can reshape how people make choices. And that fatigue, they say, could have major implications for emergency planners trying to encourage people to get out of harm’s way. Along the Gulf Coast, for instance, it was difficult get people to prepare for a second hurricane even as they were still digging out from the first, says Laura Myers, a social scientist at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. It was “just really hard to get their attention … [and] to get them to step up and do all the preparation,” she says.
I don’t usually do science reporting here at The Roots of Progress, but I spent a couple years on this problem in a junior role in the early days of D. E. Shaw Research, so it’s close to my heart. Here’s a five-minute explainer.
The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) is providing $800,000 to expand an ongoing COVID-19 detection program in wastewater.
The expanded program, which has been running as a pilot since spring, will test untreated sewage in some Detroit zip codes, as well as certain targeted zip codes in suburban communities like Sterling Heights, Oak Park, and West Bloomfield.
The program is headed up by a Michigan State University research team, led by engineering professor Irene Xagoraraki. It’s a collaboration with the Great Lakes Water Authority, and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department.
North Dakota State seniors Carlee Schroeter and Garett Levin trace COVID samples from more than 20 cities and communities around the state.
“We give them a certain code so we know where it’s from so we can then in the future see if there’s any different distinctions or relationships to see,” said Schroeter.
According to department head John McEvoy, tracing COVID through wastewater allows them include those who may be asymptomatic or a positive case that hasn’t been tested or officially counted.
UC San Diego is boosting its coronavirus testing efforts and increasing the number of samples taken for wastewater early detection, among other efforts to prevent the spread of the virus on campus, university leaders announced Tuesday.
UCSD calls its combined pandemic safety efforts the Return to Learn program, a suite of education, monitoring, testing, intervention and notification tools intended to keep students and faculty on campus safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“While UC San Diego is one of the few colleges in the nation with low rates of infection and a large student body on campus, the university remains vigilant to reduce transmission of virus in our community to the greatest extent possible,” UCSD Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla said. “Our multi- layered strategy provides resiliency along many dimensions of the Return to Learn plan.”
The Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene and the Department of Health Services are collecting samples from over 100 wastewater treatment facilities, the largest network of its type yet, to trace patterns in the spread of COVID-19.
Wisconsin is one of five founding states in a national surveillance system by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, an effort to detect the virus and trends in wastewater samples. Martin Shafer, a senior scientist in the Laboratory of Hygiene, said he first began noticing the epidemiological approach in Europe early in 2020.
The lab then spent spring and summer developing the tools and methodology and was funded by federal CARES funding to build the network. Sampling began in September, a process that collects and detects viral loads in wastewater samples with a turnaround time of one to two days.
“Wastewater-based epidemiology has been around a while but it’s never been done on a semi-real time basis and used for actionable public health,” Shafer said. “It’s always been done kind of retrospectively …
Ohio State named renowned roboticist, leader, educator and businessperson Ayanna Howard as the new dean of the College of Engineering Monday.
Howard will be the first woman to serve as the college’s dean, according to a university press release. Howard will begin the role March 1.
“Dr. Howard is an innovator whose skills and passion are a perfect fit with Ohio State’s focus on convergent research and discovery,” University President Kristina M. Johnson said in the release. “To attract a leader of her caliber shows both the strength of our engineering program and the acceleration of the university’s overall research mission.”
The products and services we use in our daily lives have to abide by safety and security standards, from car airbags to construction materials. But no such broad, internationally agreed-upon standards exist for artificial intelligence.
And yet, AI tools and technologies are steadily being integrated into all aspects of our lives. AI’s potential benefits to humanity, such as improving health-care delivery or tackling climate change, are immense. But potential harms caused by AI tools –from algorithmic bias and labour displacement to risks associated with autonomous vehicles and weapons – risk leading to a lack of trust in AI technologies.
To tackle these problems, a new partnership between AI Global, a nonprofit organization focused on advancing responsible and ethical adoption of artificial intelligence, and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI) at the University of Toronto will create a globally recognized certification mark for the responsible and trusted use of AI systems.
Since late August, the university has run more than 450,000 COVID-19 tests of students, faculty, staff, and contract employees. The vast majority of the samples collected on the Boston campus are processed in Northeastern’s own Life Sciences Testing Center, a state-of-the-art laboratory with state and federal certification on the university’s Burlington, Massachusetts campus.
Those waiting in line at the Cabot Testing Center may have spotted signs throughout the building with QR codes promoting the Testing Research Registry and Repository. The repository has been created by the university to collect COVID-19 test results and biomedical specimens donated by those getting tested.
“Our testing protocol presents an opportunity to advance the science of pandemic research,” said David Luzzi, senior vice president for research and head of Northeastern’s testing operation. “This is the first time in human history that we have developed this level of study of a particular pathogen and its pandemic consequences.”
Students, faculty, and staff can securely elect to donate their test swabs so that Northeastern researchers can use the data to study the spread and makeup of the virus.
“As severe as the wildfires have been this year, they might have been even worse were it not for an amazing event at Stanford: the 2020 Big Earth Hackathon. Now in its third year, the annual hackathon has teams of 1–4 Stanford students compete to develop data-driven solutions for important environmental use cases. Projects are judged on several characteristics, including defining the specific problem to be addressed, project impact, degree of completion, and quality of presentation. The core of the Big Earth Hackathon is the creativity and innovation of the solution.” Deadline for applications to participate is December 19.
Online December 7, starting at 1 p.m. “Join us at 1 PM for a round table discussion with @mlipsitch
, Ken Prewitt, @ruha9
, and @chriscmooney
.” [registration required]
“This program will help data stewards—responsible data leaders in the public and private sector—develop a data re-use strategy to solve public problems. Noting the ways data resources can inform their day-to-day and strategic decision-making, we teach participants ways they can use data to improve how they operate and pursue goals in the public’s interests. By working differently—using agile methods and data analytics—public sector and private sector leaders can further open data and reduce data access inequities in ways that advance their institution’s goals.” Deadline for applications is December 17.
At this point in the pandemic, your days might feel as though they’re getting longer and more repetitive. You might also find yourself having problems focusing. But instead of endlessly staring at your screen, you might want to try giving up and getting up — at least for a short while.
Taking a break to exercise has been consistently shown to have benefits on cognition. That’s according to Charles Hillman, the co-director of the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health at Northeastern University in Boston. Hillman has been studying the relationship between exercise and cognition for decades and has generally found that making time for a 20-minute brisk walk can improve work performance and brain function.